Abstract For many decades, statisticians have made attempts to prepare the Bayesian omelette without breaking the Bayesian eggs; that is, to obtain probabilistic likelihood-based inferences without relying on informative prior distributions. A recent example is Murray Aitkin´s recent book,...

The missionary zeal of many Bayesians of old has been matched, in the other direction, by an attitude among some theoreticians that Bayesian methods were absurd-not merely misguided but obviously wrong in principle. We consider several examples, beginning with Feller's classic text on...